Yes! I recently joined Pinterest and I love it. It is very much the same form of communication as Instagram but through a curatorial lens. It is an interesting way to get a sense of who people are,what they represent and what they have to say about the world and their world by a collection of photos. For me, it feels similar to my childhood experiences of viewing and exchanging stickers, marbles and garbage pale kid cards with my friends as a kid, lol!

I really love Instagram, its nice, funny and quick. In my opinion is the perfect mix between Twitter and Facebook, it gets the best from each.
Regarding the polemic, I think we’re exposed as far as we use social media, we’re uploading our content to a public site, so it’s very difficult to avoid the use of it by third parties.
We only need to be very careful with the content we publish, that’s it.

Don’t leave Instagram!!! I’m still very much there and loving it! The only other platform I’m familiar with (if you MUST leave) is Path. Very similar concept, except without the filters.

There’s still another social platform for video that I’d recommend looking into. Not Vine… Cinemagram. Brings those still images to life. NOt sure how much I’ll use it, but it’s fun to experiment. Maybe it’s more for Garance?

I can’t access it. Not on my computer or on my phone. Don’t know why but all I get is that message saying I can not connect to the page. So for me its a technical impossibility. Anyone else ever have that trouble? I mean its both the phone and the Imac.

What Instagram did is not cool. I’ve since switched to Eye Em. Very nice and easy to use. organises stuff by albums. You can tag locations/moods etc in pictures. Plus they’re a small company, and have moe respect for their hard earned users

I’ve just started with this side of photography, post Instagrab, as none of the platforms worked with the Blackberry I used to have. Like Alexandra I chose EyeEm. I chose that platform for the same reasons she did, what Instagram tried to pull, and their behavior afterwards was really shoddy and quite rude.

Topic that interests me a lot. I regularly use Instagram for filters that can be applied to images. Then do I have an item, like the cell phone, which allows me to take pictures at any time. this is a great thing because when you’re out and you never know what you see and what you can get your attention.
I also use a lot of Hipstamatic because I really like the Lomographic effect that makes the images.
So for me, Hipstamatic and Instagram are two excellent tools that I use a lot for my job.
you can see examples on my blog http://www.laterzapagina.net

I used to enjoy Instagram (both following and posting), but that advertising/3rd party use policy really turned me off. Then they responded to the controversy, but did not end up changing the most controversial part of the policy – that 3rd parties could use your images for advertising without consent or attribution.

So, I still follow others on Instagram, but I no longer post. Instead, I take pictures with Camera+ and share my images with Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. I should probably stop sharing with Facebook, as they have a similarly lame policy. Flickr’s probably the best in regards to intellectual property.

I love Instagram, though I didn’t really get into it until last December. For me, it’s just so simple that I feel no other reason to go looking elsewhere. However, I do understand why so many people have left, especially professional photographers that have a lot more to lose than someone like me. Also, there are so many different social media sites out there now that I never know what sites my friends are on, how popular it is or how long it’s going to take for hype to die down. For now, I’m sticking with Instagram!

My ‘intake’ of pictures exploded once I started using PINTEREST. So the only blogs I’ve ever read is this one, jak jil and dezeem.
I think Pinterest is first and formost a brilliant tool for whatever purpose you have and the pictures are ridiculously easily accessible. I like the fact that pinterest, when you go on, encourages you to keep the site interesting and give thought to your captions to your pictures. Nice touch.

Your audience is secure and will follow you certainly. Branch out a bit and try apps like Eye-Em which can take you beyond the square format if the image demands it. Interesting frames and filters as well.

agreed – the best part is that it’s so much more navigation friendly across platforms (I’ve hated instagram ever since it started because it’s impossible to browse through a user’s photos on the computer without some kind of 3rd party site) and it’s really great in terms of sharing images.

As a musician and a photographer, it seems to me that Instagram is just another instance of the looting of intellectual property that’s going on at the moment. When I can walk into the supermarket, fill my trolley and walk out of the store without paying, then I’ll be happy for people to use my songs and images for free. Until then I have to figure out how I can keep doing what I love and trying to pay my mortgage in a climate that encourages people to take my work for free.

EyeEm is a new platform/app that claims no ownership at all fo rthe ontent you post. Very popular woth photographers, steadily growing platform. Great look & feel in the app, give it a tryhttp://www.eyeem.com

Awesome pictures!
I’m sure you would enjoy tadaa. More quality, more editing options. I’m a professional photographer and loving tadaa for its options, its community and that tadaa respects my rights and don’t sell my pictures.http://tadaa.net

Im one of the Founders of EyeEm and we started from Berlin with a small blog. We organized the first worldwide mobile photography exhibition, the second EyeEm exhibition was in New York. We published a Book with the winners and the aim was always to create a community for the mobile photographers. So its in our DNA to protect and respect the rights of the artists. Thank you!

The controversy upset me too – I will continue to pay close attention to their actions. However, for now, Instagram is still the best place for photo sharing for me. My community is there and more important than sharing my photography – I use Instagram to share snapshots of my life specifically with far-away friends and see theirs.

One thing I would highly recommend are VSCO Cam and AfterLight.They are photo editing apps that have their own filters, as well as options like brighten contrast, exposure, highlights etc. Instagram filters are often a bit too extreme for me! I love pushing myself to take great photos using my phone – and these give me much more control and help my photos look closer to what I was trying to capture.

I was so pissed off by Instagram trying to grab our photos that I moved to EyeEm – which I like… Although, like you, the whole debate made me reflect and realize that I’d proabably rather spent more time contemplating and to focus on quality than quantity photography.

I use instagram as well. I’m quick to block the advertisers and spammers. If you already have followers I think it’s probably best to maintain the network you created instead of jumping ship before the platform has run it’s course. And they did recently launch the web profiles and did succumb to pressure to adjust their terms of service. So it is improving.

I have found with a new app called PicTapGo http://pictapgo.com/ I can post full-frame images and I love their filters and ability to stack and reverse a step on the filters. I have tried other apps and plain old instagram itself and found the square and the filters restricting. PicTapGo will link in and open your image for posting in intagram as well as other social media platform. It is the app I had been waiting for.
Cory Ann

Funny…I was just about to start experimenting with instagram to promote my various yarn- and knitting-related works, but I’ve been hooked on Pinterest for a while. It really suits my visual side. It never feels like work (although it generally is) to post, ‘like’ photos there. It’s just like Vogue Magazine bigger than the fall issue, the ultimate cookbook with more burners on fire than Julia Child…all rolled in one site! Don’tcha think??

I’ve gone from using medium format digital and expensive DSLR’s to an old Olympus 35mm film camera for personal work. Brings me back too the many years I used medium and large format film cameras. It’s not Instagram but I LOVE FILM!

Stick with Instagram, especially if you care about growing your audience. The advertising controversy was addressed and IG has revised their terms of service and made it clear that they never intended to use people’s photos w/o their permission. If you are worried about your photos being pirated, then you should keep in mind that all the photos that you’ve posted on your website can also be downloaded without your permission just as easily as they can be accessed by the public on IG. Those are just the times we live in.

I’m sad to hear people still talking about the Instagram TOS changes as if they could sell your photos. Their proposed TOS, which really wasn’t that different from their original, just allows them to do no more than display your publicly viewable images within the app. They couldn’t sell your images as stock art, or post them in an Apple ad, they could just display your photo within the app along with your name. Just like Twitter does with their suggested followers list, etc. As a matter of fact, IG’s new terms of service are practically identical to Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. The “Right to display images” sounds dramatic, but it’s really not.

There are plenty of other reasons to stop using IG, (the images are small, there’s no archiving or proper form of tagging, you can’t post from the web, it’s extremely closed off), but worrying about their TOS is not one of them. Unless you also want to leave the other services listed above.

I’ve tried other platforms before, but so far Instagram has been the easiest & most stable of them all. Yes, the spams & fake followers bits are irritating, but I think one way of not getting those is don’t use hashtags in your photos. That will, of course, limit your audience, or people finding your photos. But in your case, I reckon it doesn’t matter :-)

I quite like VSCO. It doesn’t involve any sort of platform to share your photos like Instagram does, but it produces some really nice images that you can alternatively just share on facebook if need be.

I’ve also dropped Instagram after the PR fiasco. But it was a good move. I went back to Flickr, who has a great iPhone app. I actually love the available options even more than Instagram and haven’t missed it at all.

I like the fact instagram is available in china …. unlike most of the other platforms … 1 billion fans ….. with England talking of filtering the internet and US 0f A talking the same… stick to what is known …. or get a weibo account … english weibo is already released… by the way i am not chinese …. just work in social media.

Back in 2006 we used fotolog a lot- you could only upload a photo a day so it has to totally reflects the mood of the moment. it was a great platform before facebook and all arrived. minus the filters.
x

Check out this new free iPhone app called Vine. It can be a new effective, short and quick way for you to document different parts of your experiences in a new way… A friend of mine just introduced me to it and I can’t get enough! Basically it’s like instagram but for 6 second videos and it’s great!

Scott – I recently started using Pinterest. Its strengths lie in your ability to easily organize Pins into customized Boards (I refuse to use the word “curate”, which is now overused to the point of banality :->).

Pins can be embedded or sent to Twitter for promotion purposes – but Pinterest & Twitter need to work together to improve cross-integration, which is less than seamless.

However, while Pinterest’s mobile phone app is pretty good, it still lacks the immediacy of Instagram. I’m not sure why – it may be just force of habit by users.

So for this reason, Instagram continues to be used for users’ personal pictures, while Pinterest seems to be used to collect and organize photos and videos from around the Web (as well as from users’ scans).

The new Flickr app is great and more people need to revisit them. I’m still instagramming because all my friends are still there. Tried Path and I did love the filters but from what I remember it’s more personal so perhaps not suited to gathering a large following. They did have some nice photo filters.

Stay away from Pinterest. It’s not a photo sharing site, it’s a copyright infringement no-man’s-land. People will share your images without attribution, since the original link is lost when the image is shared.

I highly recommend the movie “Connected: an autobiography about love death & technology”. There is some amazing information about how the surge of images is altering the way we think and balancing out our very left brain society -
you will love it!http://connectedthefilm.com/

If you set your IG account to private, you are insulated from the unauthorized usage of your images. It’s a pain, but it works until the next best sharing platform emerges. So far it seems there are too many out there to tell which will be best.

I still use instagram for work, but I use path for anything of note and anything private, its sort of like my scrap book that i want to share with select people, i love it, same features as instagram but you can load small videos too, you can also chose who is in your audience (or on your path!), so you are a bit more in control.